An epic and visual merry-go-round about the sick and the dead in Hong Kong, yet it remains light-hearted. A story filled with pop music, with a pop singer in the leading role (Ella Koon), yet the tone remains serious. With a very special funeral director, one you’ll remember.
Four protagonists, two generations and two continents are interwoven in Merry-Go-Round, a grand yet intimate narrative about leaving and returning. It starts in San Francisco, where Eva works as a traditional Chinese doctor, and young, roaming Merry hears that she has leukaemia. Both return to Hong Kong: Merry looks up Allen, with whom she had previously corresponded, and gets a job in the Tung-Wah guardhouse for coffins run by the grumpy Hill. Eva tries to prevent the same Allen, her cousin, from selling the family business. In the meantime, the older woman thinks back to an affair she had in the 1930s.
Directors Mak Yan Yan and Clement Cheng cleverly bring together the various storylines in their beautifully illuminated film, supported by a soundtrack by Hong-Kong folk pop band Ketchup.
Programmer Note by Gertjan Zuilhof:
The music and its use in Mak Yan Yan and Clement Cheng’s film is truly remarkable. It is no ordinary film music. Not everyone who saw, or rather heard, the film could appreciate it, but the choice is daring and exceptional. Most film music has no vocals and is more or less based on classical music. If it is more contemporary there are still generally no vocals, bar the odd theme song at the beginning or end. No, I’m not on about Bollywood, but about western or Asian narrative cinema. But anyway. This film is full of pop songs or, as the makers term them, film songs. The songs are by Ketchup and the music supervisors describe themselves as: Harris HO@goomusic/Yu Yat-yiu@PMPS.
The film is an ambitiously epic story and normally these are set to serious music, but the English-language pop songs by Ketchup from Hong Kong give the film a sometimes commercial airiness.
The leading role for pop star Ella Koon (The Shopaholics) emphasises the film’s pop tone even more, but it is all the more remarkable that the film tells a complicated story across multiple generations with a plethora of historic detail.
The makers clearly wished to make a different type of historical drama and, even if it sometimes sounds unusual, they were successful.